Late Thursday evening, Michael Cohen reclined in the back seat of a car on his way back to New York City. In the past, whenever he had to meet with congressional staff members or the special counsel’s office, Cohen had taken the train to Washington, D.C. But this visit was different. He had delivered three testimonies before Congress, including an appearance in front of the House Oversight Committee, which had been broadcast on television and streamed across the Internet. Millions of people watched as he presented lawmakers with evidence of a check the president signed, while in office, reimbursing Cohen as part of a hush-money scheme they’d drummed up in the days leading up the 2016 election to keep an alleged affair out of the news. He also shared documents that suggest Donald Trump manipulated the value of his assets over the years to fool banks, insurance companies, and media organizations about his net worth. In private sessions with lawmakers, Cohen testified that Trump’s team had obliquely dangled the possibility of a presidential pardon. As a result, train travel was a security issue. After months of what Cohen perceived as threats and intimidation from his former boss, now the president of the United States, he wanted to return home with a modicum of privacy.

Cohen was also drained. He had spent the day behind closed doors with members of the House Intelligence Committee, in what people close to him have said was the most contentious of three marathon hearings on Capitol Hill. Cohen hadn’t slept much, and he was spent. More than anything, he just wanted to get home to his family, who had been watching it all play out from their apartment in a Trump building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. During the four-hour drive, Cohen asked the driver to pull over at a rest stop. Inside, a woman tapped him on the shoulder. “Mr. Cohen?” she said. “I just want to say I watched you, and thank you for what you did.” Hours later, as the car sailed up Park Avenue around 11 o’clock, Cohen saw the taxi driver in the car next to him motioning for him to roll down his window. “Hey brother,” Cohen said. The cabbie gave him a thumbs up. “Thanks man,” he chuckled.

The next day, Cohen walked the short two blocks from his apartment to Freds—the fishbowl of a restaurant atop Barney’s that’s become his de facto office in the months since the F.B.I. knocked on his door last April. On his way over to lunch with his daughter, a woman stopped them in their tracks, insisting that they let her pray with them. So they did. A little after 1 p.m., on Madison Avenue, Cohen, his daughter, and a woman with slime-green acrylic nails held a make-shift prayer circle for a few minutes before they continued on to the department store.

Cohen, who will report to prison in May to begin a three-year sentence, has had many such unexpected moments. Over the weekend, a FedEx guy hopped out of his truck asking for a selfie. After dinner with friends on Saturday, Cohen sat down to watch Saturday Night Live, which opened its show with a spoof of his public testimony, with Ben Stiller once again playing him. “Of course the first time I testified was under oath, but this time I, like, really mean it,” Stiller said. Cohen couldn’t help but laugh. “Over here,” Bill Hader, who played an even angrier Representative Jim Jordan, kept reminding him—a nod to the fact that, several times during the hearing, Cohen couldn’t quite make out where to look when lawmakers started their line of questioning. (Cohen has significant hearing loss in his left ear. He often jokes that the only reason he hasn’t gotten a hearing aid is because he is too vain.)

The weekend wasn’t all selfies and S.N.L., however. Cohen also had to dig through more documents in preparation for another round of testimony on Capitol Hill this week. (Last week, I reported that Cohen had dug through nine boxes of documents returned to him from the S.D.N.Y., which ultimately led to him getting copies of the checks signed by Trump.) During his public hearing last Wednesday, Cohen told the House Oversight Committee that Trump’s lawyers had reviewed and made “changes” to drafts of his 2017 congressional testimony, in which Cohen lied about the duration of his negotiations with Russian officials about building a Trump Tower in Moscow. (Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s legal team who Cohen named as involved in the process, called this claim “completely false.”) In closed hearings last week, lawmakers expressed interest in the circumstances surrounding those changes, who asked Cohen to make them, and if Cohen had any records of their communications about the drafts. Before returning to Washington on Tuesday evening to testify again, Cohen recovered additional documents related to what was changed from his 2017 testimony about the Moscow project.

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Details from Cohen’s latest testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, and attendant physical evidence, have not yet trickled out. But it is already clear that his testimony last week has spurred action within Congress and other investigative bodies. On Monday, members of the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic caucus sent letters requesting information and documents from more than 80 people and organizations with connections to Trump, his White House, campaign, business, and family, including his adult sons and son-in-law, key executives in the Trump Organization, and former senior staffers in the administration. Later that day, New York State regulators subpoenaed the Trump Organization’s insurance company, following a line of questioning by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked Cohen last week if Trump ever inflated the value of his assets to an insurance company. Cohen answered with a simple “yes.”

While it appears that investigators are taking Cohen’s assertions seriously, despite repeated attacks on his credibility by the White House and Republicans, the American public seems to believe Cohen more than the president. According to a new poll from Quinnipiac, 50 percent of voters say they believe Cohen over Trump, while 35 percent responded that they believe Trump more. Fifty-eight percent of voters said they think Congress “should do more to investigate” Cohen’s “claims about President Trump’s unethical and illegal behavior.” In perhaps the greatest validation of Cohen’s testimony, 64 percent of respondents now believe Trump committed crimes before he became president.